The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  And one summer I worked for Mr. Winfield Scott Cowan, who ran the boathouse and refreshment stand at Lake George near where the trolley cars stopped. Mr. Cowan had married a daughter of George W. Brown and lived in a big house across the street from the Brown Cornplanter Works. He was a medium-sized man with a dark-brown mustache, and he knew how the business should be run, down to such fine points that nearly always he was worrying about this or that not going to come out right. If anything went wrong, he acted as though something else was going to go wrong pretty soon.

  My job was to let rowboats to people for twenty-five cents an hour. I would give them the oars, help them pick a boat, and then help them shove off. I had charge of the refreshments and sold ice cream and cake or cookies, pop, ginger ale, and a line of candies.

  Mr. Bobbit had charge of the little steamboat that held ten or twelve people, twenty-five cents for a ride to the end of the lake and back. People said she was the prettiest steamboat in Knox County, and as there was no other steamboat in Knox County it was the solemn truth. Her name was Lady Washington. Mr. Bobbit kept up steam all day; on some days he had all the passengers he could handle and on other days nobody riding. A man-sized man, Mr. Bobbit, he was tall, broad-shouldered, thick through the body, quick in his motions, and always seemed to know what was going on and what to do. He had a blond mustache and keen eyes that could twinkle. He was English and had been a policeman somewhere, I heard. I am sure he was a first-class policeman. He was good company and said, “I worry when it’s time to worry and what you don’t know sometimes is a help.”

  It didn’t come hard to leave Mr. Winfield Scott Cowan at the end of the season, him and his worrying. Leaving the company of Bobbit wasn’t so good. He said he expected a night-watchman job in the fall and winter. I said I hoped I’d see him again, though I never did.

  Two weeks of ice harvest on Lake George came one January, the thermometer from zero to fifteen above. I walked from home six blocks to catch a streetcar that ran the mile and a half out to the lake. The night gang worked from seven at night till six in the morning, with an hour off at midnight.

  The ice was twelve to eighteen inches thick. Men had been over it with horse teams pulling ice cutters. In the first week on the job I was a “floater.” Rafts of ice about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide had been cut loose. The floater stood on a raft and, pushing a pronged pole, he propelled the raft and himself to the chutes at the big icehouse. There the ice was broken into blocks or cakes, and a belt carried them up where they were stood in rows with sawdust sprinkled between to hold them cold till summer and warm weather.

  I had overshoes and warm clothes and enjoyed the work. The air was crisp, and you could see a fine sky of stars any time you looked up, sometimes a shooting star and films of frost sparkles. I had never had a night job that kept me till the sun came up. I got acquainted with a little of what goes on over the night sky, how the Big Dipper moves, how the spread of the stars early in the night keeps on with slow changes into something else all night long. I did my wondering about that spread of changing stars and how little any one of us is standing and looking up at it.

  The other floaters were good fellows and we hollered to each other over the dark water our warnings that if you fell in the water you’d find it cold. At midnight we went up a slope to the Soangetaha Clubhouse of the bon ton. On the porch, away from the windy side, we ate what we had carried out in paper bags.

  The second week I was put in the icehouse, where a dozen of us worked on a footing of blocks or cakes of ice, the chute feeding us more cakes of ice. Each cake was about three feet long, two feet wide, and a foot thick. We threw our iron tongs into the end of a cake and then rassled and wrangled it twenty or thirty feet to where it stood even with a row of other cakes. Heavy work, it had my back and shoulder muscles pulling and hauling like a mule. I had never before felt so sure that what I was doing could be done better somehow by mules or machines. I went home the first morning with muscles from ankles to neck sore and aching. I ate breakfast, went to bed right away, and lay abed trying to coax myself to sleep. But muscles would twitch and it was past noon before I went to sleep. Then three or four times I suddenly came awake with the muscles singing. When my mother woke me and said, “It’s time to go to work,” I was just beginning to sleep, it seemed. I had to unwind myself slowly to get out of bed and into my clothes.

  The second night was worse. I would try for a rest by walking slow back to the chute. If I tried for a rest standing still two or three minutes, the foreman would come along, a quiet man saying in a voice that just carried over the noise of the rattling chute and the hustling men, “Better slide into it, Sandburg.” If he had bawled or snarled it at me, I would have quit the job on the spot. He remembered my name and I wasn’t just a number, I was a person. And he said “Better slide into it” nearly like my mother waking me out of sleep to go to work. I had respect for him and hoped sometime I could be a foreman and act and talk like him.

  Near daybreak I thought to myself, “Come seven o’clock and I’m quitting.” I stood still thinking about it and getting a rest when the foreman came along. “Better slide into it, Sandburg. You know there’s only a few more days on this job. I think we’ll be through this week.” And that gave me a different feeling. I went home, slept better, ate better, and the muscles all round weren’t as stiff. I lasted the week through, and at a dollar and twenty-five cents a night I had earned higher wages than in any work before. One thing I noticed. I hustled a little too much. Most of the other men on the job had been railroad section hands, ditch-diggers, pick-and-shovel men, and they knew what my father sometimes reminded me of on a piece of work, “Take your time, Sholly.” They worked with a slow and easy swing I hadn’t learned.

  I was sixteen or seventeen when I carried water, ran errands, a few times helped sponge and dry a sweating horse, over six weeks of racing at the Williams racetrack. What I earned in quarters and half-dollars ran maybe up to ten dollars. But I had a pass to come in at any time and I saw up close the most famous trotting and pacing horses in the world.

  C. W. Williams came to Galesburg from Independence, Iowa, where he had what they called a “kite-shaped” racetrack, though some said it was more like the figure eight. He had been a telegraph operator and had picked up, at prices that later looked silly, two mares. The world-famous stallions Axtell and Allerton were foaled from those two mares “bought for a song.” In 1889 the three-year-old Axtell cut the world’s trotting record for stallions down to two minutes and twelve seconds, and on the night of that day was sold to a syndicate for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, said to be then the highest price ever paid for a horse of any breed. Two years later Mr. Williams could have sold his stallion Allerton for more than he got for Axtell. This was after Mr. Williams himself drove Allerton to cut down the world stallion record to two minutes and nine and three-quarters seconds.

  So when Mr. Williams came to Galesburg in 1894 he had a reputation, organized the Galesburg District Association, and laid out a new racetrack on one hundred and twelve acres on the Knoxville Road east of Farnham Street. The new racetrack, Mr. Williams gave it out, was “the only dead-level track in the world.” Shaped like a railroad coupling pin, the long sides of it were dead level, with the ends graded for the sulkies to make the turn. In the great six-weeks racing meet that Mr. Williams put on, there were rainy days when races had to be put off and other days when small crowds came, even though the trotters and pacers had national reputations. But there was one big week of good weather and one smashing big day in that week. That was the day we saw the black mare Alix come down the home stretch to break the world’s record for trotters.

  That day put Galesburg on the map for horsemen and horselovers over the whole country. At the center was Mr. Williams. He was a medium-sized man with an interesting face. He made a great name in the horse world and breeders came from the country over to see him. The blood of his stallions ran for many years in winning horses.

&n
bsp; Then harness racing began to run down in style. Mr. Williams sold all his horses for good money and put it into Canada land dealings. I like to think of him as I saw him once on an October morning, a little frost still on the ground, in a sulky jogging around the only dead-level racetrack in the world, driving at a slow trot the stallion Allerton, being kind and easy with Allerton, whose speed was gone but whose seed were proud to call him grandsire.

  Twelve: Working for Fun

  ONE NIGHT AT home we heard the Opera House was burning and I ran down to the corner of Main and Prairie to watch it. I stood across the street from the fire till midnight. I didn’t like to see the place go, I could remember so much about it. There I had seen the Kickapoo Indians in buckskins and feather headdress, in dances stomping and howling their lonesome war songs which we tried to imitate. They stayed six weeks and I went once or twice a week, admission free. The white man they worked for was a slicker and would put in his spiels: If you had rheumatism or ached in muscles or bones, you eased it with Kickapoo Indian Snake Oil. If you had trouble with stomach or liver you took a few spoons of Kickapoo Indian Sagwa and your insides felt better and a bottle or two cured you. We listened and did imitations of him.

  On the stage boards now burning Doctor O’Leary had lectured, admission free. Vegetarianism was his line. What he was selling I forget. He stayed three or four weeks telling what meat does to you, how you have a tired feeling most of the time and you don’t have strength for your work. After he left town I didn’t eat meat for two weeks, and I found I had the same tired feeling. I began eating meat again and I couldn’t feel the poisons so I forgot about Doctor O’Leary.

  There on five or six nights one month I had paid my ten cents to sit in the gallery and watch the first mesmerists I had seen. They looked in the eyes of fellows I knew, made passes in front of their faces, and had them fighting bumblebees, or swimming across a carpet. There I saw the body of a living man, his head on one table, his feet on another table, his torso and legs stiff as a hard oak log. A rock was laid on his body and the powerful blacksmith Ben Holcomb swung a sledge on the rock and split it. The body stayed stiff and straight through the whole act. Then the mesmerist snapped his fingers in the fellow’s face, said something like “Right! right!,” helped the fellow to his feet, and the two of them held hands and bowed to the applauding audience. “It wasn’t a miracle but it was a wonder,” we said.

  The curving and sizzling tongues of fire licked away the stage curtain and boards where I had seen a diorama of the Battle of Gettysburg. They told us about it at Grammar School, admission five cents. One diorama curtain after another came down showing different parts of the battle. The curtains were dirty and worn. The man with a long pointer explaining the battle had short oily whiskers you couldn’t tell the color of. His clothes looked like he had slept in them and never brushed them. His voice squeaked. What he was saying you could tell he had said so many times that it didn’t interest him and his mind was somewhere else. I was so curious about how creepy and sad the man with the pointer looked that half the time I didn’t see what he was pointing at.

  Before my eyes the boards were burning where I had first seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet and was interested only in the killings at the end. I had seen a man walk out on that stage that I was terribly curious about. I had seen cartoons of him in the Chicago papers, and from what I had read I expected he would tear the air and beat his chest and stamp his enemies under his feet. He was John Peter Altgeld and he was running for governor of Illinois. He just stood in the same foot tracks through his whole speech, about an hour and a half, and never sawed the air once with his hands. The few times he did lift his hands to make a point the motions were as if he could be running a hand along the forehead of a sick friend. He talked in a quiet way as though if we should be quiet too we could make up our minds about what he was saying. I wasn’t sure of all he had said but I felt I would be more suspicious of his enemies than of him.

  The new Auditorium was built at Broad Street and Ferris and often when out of work and puzzled where to go, I would end up there. It was an up-to-date theater with a main floor, a balcony, and a gallery that was called “Nigger Heaven.” The seats nearest to the stage, ten or fifteen rows, were the “parkay.” On the tickets it said “parquet.” The stage was big enough to handle any show from Broadway, and nearly every Broadway hit heading straight west made a stop at Galesburg.

  Some of my work at the Auditorium I got paid for. Mostly I got to see the show for a little work I liked to do. The stage carpenter was American-born of Swedish parents, Oscar Johnson, and everybody called him “Husky.” He could drive us and shout at us when there was a rush to be on time with all the scenes and props for the next act, and we took it he had a right to blow off steam. The property man, Charles Rose, everybody called “Cully.” He knew he knew everything a property man ought to know and if you wanted an argument he would give it to you. He believed in having props in order and on time. He could do quick headwork and we liked the way he ordered us around. Cully Rose hired the “supes.” A supernumerary didn’t travel with the show but they had to have their supes. I suped in McFadden’s Flats. On the stage was an office scene on the eighth floor of a Chicago skyscraper. Off stage four supes watched the man in charge of us. When he went “Ahh-ahh-ahh” real loud and “Ohh-ohh-ohh” louder yet and “Umhh-umhh-umhh” softer, we did the same. What were we doing? We were making the clatter and the rumbling of the Chicago street eight floors below the office on the stage. When the play was showing the big Chicago fire of 1871, the supes ran across the stage with boxes, packages, and bundles, moaning and hollering. Then we ran back around the stage, got different boxes, packages, and bundles, and ran across the stage again trying to give out new moans and yells.

  We worked as sceneshifters, and as we finished there might be at our elbows a few steps away a famous star waiting to make her entrance. We would see a comedian in his comic make-up, his face solemn, his eyes on the stage, waiting his cue to go on. A minute later he would be out before the footlights wriggling and twisting, his face and eyes lit up and the audience roaring. Sometimes there would be an actor saying in a low voice the first line he would say when he stepped out on the stage. They brushed by us after their exits, breathing hard after a heavy scene, sometimes limp and sweating.

  When we worked in the “flies” we got ten cents a night. We were up thirty or forty feet, and on signals we would send up one curtain and let down another, pulling on ropes. If we got the wrong curtain we certainly heard from down below. Cully Rose could holler and he could be sarcastic. From where we were we could see parts of the play and if there was music or singing we caught it all.

  We saw John L. Sullivan close-up playing in Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. We could see he liked stepping out on the stage and he wasn’t afraid of any audience. In one scene he sat at a table playing he was in trouble and had to use his wits. He put his elbows on the table, dropped his chin into his cupped hands, and then in a whisper he was sure the audience could hear, “Now I must tink.” When he took a curtain call he made a fine low bow to the audience, gave a little speech, ended it “I remain yours truly John L. Sullivan,” and walked off the stage.

  Fridtjof Nansen came. I had read his magazine articles that went into his book Farthest North, but I couldn’t scrape up the fifty cents to hear him lecture. I was on hand when his train pulled in at the Q. depot, though. It was snowing and I thought he looked like a Scandinavian hero, tall in a long fur coat, as he walked the platform and through the station to where I watched him get into a Union Hotel hack.

  When Henry M. Stanley, the African explorer, came to lecture, I was there again at the Q. depot to see him get off the train and tag at his heels through the depot. He wasn’t as much to look at as Nansen. To me he was a Famous Writer while Nansen was a Great Norseman and a Viking with a heart for all human strugglers.

  James J. Corbett, world’s champion boxer, came in Gentleman Jim, and his bag-punching opened our ey
es. I was following big-league baseball when I heard that Arlie Latham, the dandy second baseman of the Cincinnati Reds, would do a song and dance in a show, and I went to see it. The show wasn’t much and Arlie Latham was no star at singing and dancing, but I had seen a hero. I didn’t see Bob Fitzsimmons, another world’s champion, in his show. But I did see him on the Q. depot platform, tall and lanky, with salmon hair and pink skin, leading a pet lion back and forth.

  I helped on the stage when Monte Cristo came to town with James O’Neill the star. The sea that he swam when he made his escape, the rolling of that canvas sea, was made by some other boys and myself. There was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin show I peddled bills for and got paid ten cents and a ticket to the show. The bills said there would be two Uncle Toms, two Evas, two Simon Legrees, two Elizas crossing the Ohio River, and two packs of bloodhounds. We were puzzled how there could be two of everything, and we went expecting something new and different. What we saw was just one more Uncle Tom show, with one of everything instead of two. The trick brought out a good crowd that would be suspicious about again paying cash to see two of everything.

  We got used to melodramas where the mortgage hangs over the house and in the end the villain with the mortgage gets what is coming to him. Or it might be the will of a dead man and they poked here and there hunting for it, saying “The old will, the old will.” Regular on the calendar came a Civil War play with a Union spy in love with a Rebel girl or the other way around, but always wedding bells and appleblossoms in the end. I suped in one of these, Shenandoah.